AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t let you touch him.”
“Your fear?” she shot back, “or this ‘Operations’? He is clothed.”
“My fear.”
She was hurt when Ben remained silent.
Crista shrank back from him, and Rico slipped into the Guemes dialect that he’d set aside years ago.
“Among Islanders, I am merely advising one of my sisters that she needs to recognize the depth of trust and love that the people have for her,” he said, with a curt nod of his head. “They speak out to her when the speaking is painful.”
“And the fear?”
Good! Rico thought. She won’t be bullied.
He continued to speak to her in the manner of the Guemes Islanders.
“This sister apprises the brother well. Let the brother remind the sister that only the unknown is feared. Perhaps the sister will set this brother at ease, in time. Shall we begin?”
She was quiet then, and Rico liked that about her. Whatever curse she carried, she carried it with grace. He had known Ben Ozette for twenty-five years. Rico had fallen in love with a dozen women during that time, but Ben had only fallen once. Rico remembered that Ben had looked at Beatriz Tatoosh the same way he now looked at Crista Galli.
It’s about time, he thought, and smiled to himself. Beatriz is tight with that guy MacIntosh. Ben needs somebody solid, too.
Everybody knew that relationships within the industry had to be short-lived, and that families were impossible. With all of the travel and stress something, somewhere, had to give and it was usually the relationship. Rico had given up long ago and was currently seeing a redhead who worked full-time for Operations.
“The harbor,” Rico said as they started down the ramp. “It’s a madhouse there and so far no security near the Flying Fish. Victoria’s as secure as Victoria gets, so we’ll head up there. Risky, but not so risky as this.”
They turned right, walking slowly down the pier, toward the crowd at dockside. Rico trailed slightly behind the couple, keeping buildings and hatchways close, and didn’t speak. He nearly stumbled into the Galli girl several times as she stopped suddenly to stare at some of the shops and the relics of herself that were sold there. At each shop, she pulled the mantilla closer about her face.
So, it’s true, Rico thought. She doesn’t know!
He watched her reach out toward a tasteless vest in a glass case that bore the inscription: “Vest of Crista Galli, worn at age twelve. Not for sale.” Also arranged about the case were various microscope slides with blood smears on them, a clipping of hair too obviously dark to be hers and several bits of cloth—all with price tags, all claiming to come from “Her Holiness,” Crista Galli. Above the case was scrawled a hand-lettered warning: “Extreme danger, do not touch. Safety packaging included with each sale.”
You’d think she’d never seen a dog before, he thought, watching her, or a chicken—she sure went loony over those goddamn chickens.
Rico dawdled close behind them and tried not to listen to their talk. He hadn’t eaten since the previous morning and the charcoal spatter of hot food set his stomach rumbling. He was a little nervous, plenty could still go wrong. But the diversion had taken one patrol off their backs.
If the boys are doing their jobs, we shouldn’t see a security between here and the boat.
Just as he thought it he knew better, but there was no calling the thought back and there was no calling back the two security guards rounding the corner ahead of them. Rico pressed a switch on the broadcast unit in his pocket. A third explosion went off near the harbor but neither guard took the bait. Rico sighed and adjusted the lasgun at the back of his waistband. It was an older model, short-range. He remembered thinking, as the two guards veered across the street toward them, how difficult it had become to buy spare charges.
Ben and Crista saw the security and slowed to a stop. Commuters and street vendors pressed past them in waves. Rico stopped, too, a few paces behind them and in front of a deep hatchway. With the new explosion there was a renewed flurry among those crowding toward the harbor, and Rico was not happy that Ben had stopped. Both of the men approaching wore the khaki fatigues of the Vashon Security Forces, rank four. They were both burly, armed only with stunsticks, nearly normal but with the creased ears and fat lower lips betraying certain internal defects typical of Lost Islanders.
Just as Rico’s hand clutched the grips of his lasgun, Crista Galli stepped forward, exaggerating the rolling walk of the heavily pregnant. She spoke, her hand upraised and head tilted in the Guemes fashion of greeting.
“Brothers,” she said, “this mother cannot find a rest station and she is in great need.” This she delivered matter-of-factly, and turned her palm up. Though the guards were obviously jumpy, the response was automatic.
“Up two streets, one street left. The shops—”
The other security gave his partner a shove and interrupted: “This could be the start of a Shadow attack … let’s move! Sister, get out of the street. You two,” he pointed to Ben and Rico, “get her inside someplace and lay low.”
The two guards huffed toward their station at the harbor and Rico let out the breath he’d been holding in a low whistle. It was a coded whistle, from their childhood days, that any Islander wot would recognize as “all clear.”
“You sure made Rico happy,” Ben said, grinning.
“Got it all on tape, too,” Rico said. He tapped a tiny lens at his shirtfront. “It’ll look great in your memoirs.”
He nodded at Crista.
“Good job thinking, helluva good job acting.” He rechecked the charges in the camera at his belt and buffed the lapel lens with his sleeve. The lens looked like a small pin made of a glossy gray stone.
“Shouldn’t we get out of here?” Crista asked. “You heard what he said, the Shadows—”
“Are us,” Rico interrupted in a whisper, “and there will be no attack. The villagers might bust loose, though. Things are pretty hot. The Flying Fish is down there.” He pointed out the “Pier Four” sign just ahead.
One of the huge cross-bay ferries had surfaced dockside, unwilling to risk explosive damage in the comparatively shallow waters of the bay. Foot passengers from all over Pandora streamed out of the rear hatch, while two- and three-wheeled vehicles crowded the roadway. The morning dust changed to mud under all the feet and mud splashed up from wheels to stain the hems of fine Islander embroidery. Islanders even dressed up to go to market.
About half of the crowd that elbowed back down the pier wore the plastic ID tag around their necks that marked them as Project Voidship employees. Whatever they did, they did it for Flattery’s paycheck. This was a huge village, huge enough to strain the bonds of family, and today many of the dockside vendors threw catcalls and curses after the workers from the shuttle launch site.
The pier itself was a bridge between two subway mouths—one from the village to the pier, and another that loaded onto the submarine ferry. Vendors crowded the station entrances, selling tubes of suntan lotion, sodas, dried fruits. Here the smell of charcoal and the spatter of grilled fish were drowned out in the babble of the crowds.
Suddenly, one of Rico’s greatest fears was made real. An Islander refugee, carrying a placard and wet to the skin from a firehosing, rushed down the crowded pier and attacked one of the commuters. They both fell in a tumble and, out of reflex as much as anger, the knot of commuters began kicking at him. Several dozen refugees tried in their weak way to free him, then to fight back, but within a matter of blinks they were all set upon and beaten.
Rico and Ben closed tight on Crista Galli and Rico looked for a way down the pier. Screams of anger turned to grunts of pain all around them. Bodies splashed into the bay and the hot morning was filled with curses and the wet red smack of fists on skin.
Crista kept her arms folded in front of her and her hands in her sleeves, like many of the old Islander women. She seemed locked in position with her hand out, like a figure from a wot’
s game of freeze-tag. As they worked through the crowd she stumbled on the Islander’s battered placard and Rico saw that it read, “Give a Brother a Break!”
A splintering sound and the wail of bent bracing came from behind them, then screams of fear. Rico saw, over his shoulder, that a portion of the pier had given way and hundreds of people spilled into the water.
That might cool things for now, he thought, but not for long.
“Walk slower,” Rico said at Crista Galli’s ear. “You’re tired and pregnant and haven’t eaten since last night.”
He knew that the last was true. He thought of all the meals he’d missed as a wot, wondered when was the last time Crista Galli or the Director had missed a meal. He and Ben missed plenty working the news business, but that was different. When Rico was a wot, he hadn’t chosen to go hungry.
